GIS is all about data collection and retrieval, and data can be extremely useful for police officers. Information such as where a crime was committed and who was involved can be easy to bring up in a GIS system.

Data can also help crime analysts draw conclusions about the correlation between declining neighborhoods and increasing crime in an area. For instance, if data shows a great deal of vacant housing or deteriorating buildings, crime is more likely to occur in that area. GIS makes it easy to see which areas are more likely to become crime hubs. Right away when a crime is reported, law enforcement can use GIS to learn more about the risks related to that particular area.

GIS also helps law enforcement to map where registered child sex offenders live, and helps make sure they live further than a certain distance from schools.

Watch the video below to learn more about how GIS helps law enforcement!

Need to measure a specific area for an idea or project? Using the GIS Measure Tool makes it easier to do so without the hassle of heading out with a yardstick!

First, just select the measure tool from the “Analysis” tab at the top of the application. You can then select the “area” function on the upper left of the tool bar.

Then, click the starting point on the map with a single click to define the area to measure. Double click to end and accept the area. “Measurement Info” will then appear, and units will be displayed as drop down menus.

After the area is selected, you can change the units and the screen toolbar. To clear the area, you just select “clear all”.

If you want to measure several areas, use the “add as drawing” feature in the upper left hand corner. When this function is selected, the measured area is added to the drawing temporarily and the area tool is cleared. At this point you can select “Area” again and measure a second area, and so on.

The “erase” tool will allow you to delete only the selected area, but not all areas when you create multiple measured areas as shown below.

PS: Still have questions? Sign up for our GIS User Group! It will be held on 9/30 at 10:00 in our Waukesha office. Email Claire for more details or to RSVP.

This week, wildfires forced thousands of California families to leave their homes. Fire is a serious danger, and fire crews need to be as prepared as possible to keep our local communities safe. R/M hosted a group of fire chiefs yesterday to hear about how GIS can help them do their job as efficiently as possible.

Thanks to GIS, some fire departments are able to more effectively track risks and hazards. GIS can help tell fire departments which areas are more fire-prone than others. For instance, areas that consist of wooden structures or are surrounded by flammable wildland can be entered and stored on GIS so that fire departments know where fires are likely to occur.

GIS can also be used to plan fire inspections. Crews can make sure that buildings are staying up-to-date with current fire codes and track all of their pre-emergency inspections. With all of this information stored easily on a GIS system, firefighters are able to determine if their current team is properly trained and ready to meet fires as they come. They know which areas are more likely to need them and which areas need to hold more fire drills.

But GIS is helpful during the actual emergency, too. It can provide information about the building’s structure before fire crews rush in, and any information about hazardous materials that may be inside. Another benefit of GIS to firefighters? Locating water. With an up-do-date GIS system, fire crews are able to locate water points (like fire hydrants) to help put fires out quickly.

You know what stinks? A dirty pipe. The Pipe Cleaning tools are designed to easily update information and track all information about past and present pipe cleaning events.

Once the tool is selected the “Select Pipe” dashboard appears over the Layers Legend. The dashboard provides selection tools in four different geometries for your preference. Choose one and select a pipe in the sanitary pipes layer.

Once a pipe has been selected, just click the “Add” button to add any past or present pipe cleaning events. After clicking “Add”, select “Finish” to continue to the Pipe Cleaning attributes table.

Below is the attributes table where you input information or details about the pipe cleaning event.

An example of the filled out fields is provided below.

If you’re looking to conduct a simple update, select the “Update Year Cleaned” tool.

Once the tool is selected the tools dashboard appears on the left side of the screen over the Layers Legend. To select a pipe, use one of the selection geometries to highlight the targeted pipe you wish to update

Once the pipe is highlighted, select “OK” and the window below will appear. Enter the year in which the pipe was updated and select “OK”. Your pipe is updated with just a few clicks of a button.

Wisconsin has a lot of great things: cheese, the Green Bay Packers, Ruekert & Mielke Inc., and a whole lot of farms.

In 2008, John Deere Agri Services added a new GIS option to its software. This allows info such as soil, slope and rainfall to be collected and analyzed. This vast amount of data can help farmers make difficult decisions about which crops to invest in.

Also, with accurate position information from GIS, equipment such as tractors are then able to use GPS to plant. In the video below, a tractor with a GPS system is literally driving itself. While planting, the farmer in the video explains, it’s important to drive in an incredibly straight line. GPS, with the help of GIS, is able to steer the tractor perfectly straight. All the farmer has to do is make sure nothing gets in the way.

According to the US Agriculture Census, there were 2.1 million farms in the US as of 2014. That’s a lot of people that could benefit from GIS technology. It’s pretty cool how so many different industries can benefit from GIS–farming included.

Our Forestry tool set helps Public Works departments keep track of their assets and stay organized with very little effort. As you can see below, under our Public Works tab we have six forestry tools that help update and maintain the trees within your community. Each tool has its own function, making it easier to conduct specific tasks in a user friendly format.

The first tool, “Add Tree”, is the basis for building your forestry database.

Before adding a tree, zoom to the targeted area in which you wish to place a tree. Once you’re zoomed into your preferred scale, select the “Add Tree” icon, which will open the window below in place of the layer’s list.

In order to add a tree to the map you just select the point tool, located in the window on the left side of the map, and select your target area on the map. Once you select a point on the map, a point will appear and a “Geometry Captured!” notification will appear.

Once the Geometry is captured, select “Submit” to add attributes about your new tree feature. Below is your attributes table that appears after submitting your point feature. The table provides a series of fields that allows users to give very descriptive information about tree location, characteristics, and needs assessments.

Below the attribute table or “Tree Record” table there’s a “Special Conditions” checklist that allows you to add more specific characteristics about your tree feature. This makes it easy to keep track of all of the information about that specific tree.

The “Move Tree” tool is designed to easily maneuver the location of your feature while retaining all of the features information.

When moving a tree you must first select the “Move Tree” icon. Once the icon is selected, draw a rectangle around the tree you wish to move. Once the tree is selected, click on the new targeted area and your tree will be moved.

If a tree has been removed for any reason or you added one tree to many, we offer a “Delete Trees” tool that allows you to easily delete a tree from your map as well as your tree’s database. This tools functionality is the same as the “Move Tree” tool. Select the tree you wish to delete by drawing a rectangle around the target, once the tree is selected press “Delete”.

When creating a maintenance report on a group of trees, just zoom to the targeted tree cluster and select the “Multi Tree Maintenance” tool. Once the tool is selected a window will appear on the left side of your map displaying three different geometries you can use to select your tree cluster.

Once you’ve selected your target cluster, press OK.

After selecting OK you will be prompted to select a maintenance task or type. Below is an image of the two options. Depending on your task, select either “prune” or “treat”.

Then, you can fill in the appropriate information (dates, details, etc.)

The “Select Tree By Maintenance” tool allows you to search for trees that fall under the specifications you desire. Users are able to select a single category or multiple categories to locate and identify trees that match your targeted criteria. You may also set a date range to narrow your search.

The last forestry tool we offer is the “Create Species Value Report” tool.

This tool is designed to create a value assessment on all trees in your community. By clicking the tool it generates a count for each species of tree and then calculates an average and total percent value based on a tree appraisal formula that uses the size, species, and condition of each tree. After each tree is given a value, a table or report is generated listing tree species in alphabetical order, a count for each species, the genus name, total value, average value, and percent of total. All of this is done at the click of a button and it is generated into a .pdf so it can be easily read and printed.

Last summer, a tragedy occurred when Blanco River began flooding the town of Wimberley, Texas. 15 people were killed and more than 60 homes were taken off their foundations. Of the victims, eight were swept away in the floods and went missing. Hundreds of people searched along the rough terrain of the 67-mile river attempting to find the victims.

Technology was a huge help during the search efforts—especially GIS. According to Devon Humphrey, a GIS consultant who ran Wimberley’s GIS system during the search, “GIS was tracking in real time what the field crews and search and rescue teams were seeing in the field.”

“[GIS] is used in all major emergency responses, whether it be a hurricane like Katrina or the Nepal earthquake that happened this year,” Humphrey said.

During the search, 1,500 volunteers downloaded an app where they could input details about their search locations. They entered data such as which areas needed to be revisited, which required search-and-rescue dogs and which were cleared. They could also add pictures. The information was then available to all users, updated in real time. Using this system, volunteers recovered six victims.

This usage of GIS is an amazing example of the ways technology can benefit society, in good times and bad.

Our “Manhole Reports” tool is a new trick that provides quick access to your manhole database without having to enter the map viewer. This makes it much easier to check on an important part of your infrastructure with less hassle or time spent.

The tool allows users to easily search for manhole inspections by date and/or basin as well as conduct “Repairs Needed” and “Repairs Made” assessments that are loaded straight into your database.

When searching for inspections within your targeted criteria, the tool generates a list of structures that fall within the specifications of your search. For each structure that is listed, the information is broken down into sub-categories. Each sub-category contains several fields that provide more detailed information about that specific part of the structure.

The “Repairs Needed” and “Repairs Made” tabs have the same search functionality as the “Annual Inspections” search. Once the search criterion is set, a list of the structures that fall within the parameters of the search is generated. From this list you can view the status of the structures as well as edit or update any information by clicking the “Edit” button next to the target structure.

Once your edits are made, select “Close” to save your edits and take you back to the list of structures. From there, you are able to print or export the attributes table to a .CSV by simply selecting the “Print” option beneath the table list.

This tool provides quick access to information, a structured list of information that can be easily manipulated, and the ability to access the data at the click of a button.

For the past 135 million years, sturgeon have been swimming in our lakes. In fact, sturgeon have been around for longer than Lake Michigan. But over the past 100 years, these “dinosaur fish” have slowly been disappearing due to overfishing (some species make caviar) and water pollution.

Source: wildlife.ohiodnr.gov

However, over the past ten years, Milwaukeeans have been doing their best to give the prehistoric fish a boost. The city has integrated sturgeon into their curriculum in schools and thrown a festival to celebrate the release of baby sturgeon into Lake Michigan. But UW-Milwaukee’s School of Freshwater is taking things to a new technology level: using GIS to track sturgeon.

Source: dnr.wi.gov

In order to learn the paths of the sturgeon, the Wisconsin DNR surgically implanted tags into some of the fish and released them back into the lake. Then, drones built by UWM are able to fly over the lake and pick up geographic signals sent by the fish to track their travel.

Thanks to this program, scientists will be able to put the data into a GIS program and see the migration patterns of the sturgeon, as well as their preferred habitat. With this information, Milwaukeeans can continue their efforts to increase the population of lake sturgeon and bring these prehistoric creatures back to their glory days.

Welcome to our new weekly feature! Every Tuesday, Ruekert & Mielke, Inc. will be supplying you with a tip to better use GIS to its fullest capabilities.

Ease: that’s a huge reason people use GIS. We want everything in one place, and we want that place to be at our fingertips! Today we’re showcasing our documents tool, which helps you upload documents and connect them to your GIS maps.

The “Document Upload” tool is located in the Document Management tab. The tool icons are displayed below. This tool is designed to attach documents to an area or structure with the click of a button. Once a target is selected, a point feature is developed indicating the presence of a document in that location. Instead of the document being directly linked to a structure, it is added to the documents layer so that it can be easily classified and turned on and off within the layer’s list.

The tool is very easy to use and provides a pre-determined list of classification options. The different classes are shown in the list below within the layer’s legend.

Once you select the “Add” button a window pops up prompting you to select an area or structure. Select “OK” and then click a point on the map.

After your area or structure is selected, press the “Browse” button to navigate to your document(s). When your document has been selected, just press “OK”.

Before your document can be uploaded, you will be given the option to write a brief description and select a how you would like to classify your document type. Once you’re finished, select “OK”.

After pressing “OK”, you’ll get a “Files Uploading” notification. Press “OK” again to finish the uploading process.

Once your document is uploaded you will be able to select the point feature. Clicking on the point will trigger a pop-up window that provides information about your document as well as a few other options. In order to view the document, you just click on the document’s name.

As soon as you select the title, boom–your document will load for easy viewing.